Fellowship Lunchtime Lectures: Luke Parry

Event

Luke Parry
Luke Parry

This is Teddy Hall’s new online lunchtime lecture series which aims to highlight the incredible depth and breadth of research across the Teddy Hall Fellowship.

Speaker and Topic

Dr Luke Parry on Worms: a half a billion-year history.

A worm-like body shape is present in many distantly related animal lineages, having evolved many times within animals. Among these different types of worm, the segmented annelids are the most familiar, encompassing earthworms and leeches as well as a staggering diversity of different forms that live in the ocean. Like most other major groups of animals, annelids first appear in a geological blink of an eye in an event called the Cambrian Explosion, approximately 540 million years ago. The bodies of annelids are mostly soft and typically do not survive after death as fossils. Fortunately for palaeontologists however, the Cambrian Period contains an unusually large number of exceptional fossil sites where evidence of ancient guts, muscles and even remains of nervous systems and brains are preserved.

In this talk Luke will introduce the diversity of annelid worms that live in the modern ocean and introduce recent discoveries from his own research that showcase where their staggering diversity came from, particularly during their early history over half a billion years ago.

About the Speaker

Luke Parry joined the Hall as an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Earth Sciences.

He graduated from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford with a Master’s degree in Earth Sciences in 2013. From there, here completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in 2017, which concerned the early evolutionary history of annelid worms and molluscs.

Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada and was a Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies postdoctoral fellow at Yale University from 2018-2019. Luke Joined St Edmund Hall as an early career research fellow in January 2020.

Luke’s research aims to understand a major event in the history of life referred to as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, a geologically brief interval during which all of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. This research primarily focuses on investigations of exceptionally preserved fossils from approximately 500 million years ago that retain delicate tissues, such as guts, muscles and nervous systems. This fossil data is combined with phylogenies (evolutionary trees) to understand how the body plans of major groups of animals were assembled and how they have changed over time.

Registration

You must register in order to receive the Zoom joining link the day before the lecture.

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Please note that this lecture will be recorded and published on St Edmund Hall’s digital and print communication platforms where appropriate.